Verdun and the strategy of attrition

France has almost reached the end of its war effort. If we can make it clear to the French people that from a military viewpoint there is nothing to hope for, the situation will reach a breaking point, and England will lose its best sword

(Erich von Falkenhayn)

The Eastern front, which had absorbed resources and monopolized the main operations, had been the focus of the Great War throughout 1915. After the failure of the Dardanelles campaign and the blows suffered by the Tsarist armies, the centre of operations returned to the West. Over Christmas 1915, General Erich von Falkenhayn showed the Kaiser an operations plan which included an offensive to the west. In Falkenhayn’s opinion, France was no longer able to keep up the war effort, while the military initiatives of Britain, Russia and Italy had negligible strategic value in the economy of war. The purpose of the military operation was to wear down the Armée and hence convince the French people of the impossibility of continuing the war. According to Falkenhayn’s plans, a series of limited attacks, carried out with a relatively small number of men, would force Joffre to react with counterattacks within the range of German heavy artillery which would inflict such heavy losses on the infantry that France would be unable to continue the war. Moreover, the likelihood of a sudden collapse by France was anything but remote: Joffre’s troops had born the main brunt of the war effort against the Germans since September 1914, and the losses incurred so far had greatly weakened the morale of the soldiers.

The German bombardment began in the morning on 21st February, on a front of 25 kilometres, supported by all the heavy artillery available, including the 38 cm Krupp naval guns and the 42cm howitzers: the objective was the Verdun fortress. In the afternoon, the infantry came out of their trenches and launched their attack, gradually starting to wear away at the French defences. The German offensive gave mediocre results in its early stages. However, after the bombardment, French morale was so low as to lead to fears of a collapse of the troops. Of the 2000 men in the two Chasseurs battalions under the command of Colonel Driant only 200 survived.

On 25th February, a Brandenburg infantry regiment captured Fort Douaumont, defended by fifty artillerymen and a few gunners. In fact, the French, believing they could not resist the power of the modern German heavy artillery, had started to disarm the Verdun forts. When the Brandenburg infantry reached the fort, most of the small garrison had already gone to the lower levels of the fort to escape the shelling, and indeed many sources report that the important fort was captured by a handful of combat engineers who surprised the French in their sleep. A series of bureaucratic hitches between French commands made capturing the fort even easier: General Chrétien, commander of the right sector of Verdun on 24th February, had already ordered that the forts should be defended to the bitter end, but a series of delays meant that the orders were conveyed only at 9.45 a.m. the following day.

After the initial underestimation of the attack, on 25th February Joffre decided to send General Édouard de Castelnau to Verdun. He appointed General Philippe Pétain sector commander, with orders to keep the right bank of the Meuse at all costs. After the insult of Douaumont, Verdun could not be allowed to fall. The proposal of General Langle de Cary to retreat to reorganize the defence, although the best solution, was deemed unacceptable.

Under the leadership of the charismatic Petain, and driven by rallying cries such “Ils ne passeront pas”, French troops launched into a series of furious counterattacks. Verdun had now become a symbol of the honour and the will of French resistance. The battle was fuelled by a constant flow of soldiers through the Voie Sacrée, with up to twenty thousand people transiting per day, despite the shelling. Faced with this unexpected resistance, the German offensive began to slow down, with losses increasing more and more. At the end of March total losses already amounted to more than 81,000 Germans and 89,000 French. Falkenhayn, faced with the choice of suspending the attack or extending it, decided to insist in a strategy of attrition, keeping Verdun as the objective and using all available reserves in the battle. German pressure led to the conquest, in May, of the heights of the Mort-Homme, while Fort Vaux, a cornerstone of French defence, was captured on 7th June. The Germans seemed about to capture Verdun.

However, the French forces were now determined to resist, and were now able to count on substantial (though still insufficient) artillery support, while the German batteries were worn out by intense use, leading to accidental explosions and inaccurate shelling. The continuous influx of British troops, who were preparing to launch the first major attack on the Somme, made German success even more difficult. On other fronts, initial Austrian successes in Trentino had been thwarted by Italian counterattacks, while the revival of the Russian army with Brusilov meant that the positions of the Central Powers on the Eastern Front had to be reconsidered.

The high losses and the prolongation of the battle led the Kaiser to replace von Falkenhayn with von Hindenburg and Ludendorff: the German pressure on Verdun began to loosen. Petain, who had became a national hero, was promoted to Army Chief of Staff and replaced by Nivelle. The turning point arrived on 24th October: Moroccan troops recaptured Douaumont Fort, and in the following days the French infantry advanced three more kilometres, quickly regaining all the land occupied in months of bloody attacks. Vaux Fort was recaptured in November: the German offensive had failed, while the French moral victory was clear. With losses that according to some estimates exceed 900,000 dead, wounded and missing, the battle of Verdun was one of the bloodiest of the First World War.